Tuesday, April 10, 2018

The Advanced Course on AI (ACAI) is a specialized course in Artificial Intelligence sponsored by EurAI. The 2018 edition will be in Ferrara, Italy on August 27th - 31st 2018, save the date!
The theme of the 2018 ACAI School is Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI).
StarAI is an emerging area that combines logical (or relational) AI and probabilistic (or statistical) AI.

Relational AI deals very effectively with complex domains involving many and even a varying number of entities connected by complex relationships, while statistical AI manages well the uncertainty that derives from incomplete and noisy descriptions of the domains. Both fields achieved significant successes over the last thirty years but evolved largely independently until about fifteen years ago, when the potential originating from their combination started to emerge. Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) was proposed for exploiting relational descriptions in statistical machine learning methods from the field of graphical models. Meanwhile, the scope of SRL was significantly advanced in StarAI to cover all forms of reasoning and models of AI. StarAI is nowadays an ample area encompassing many and diverse approaches.

The school includes courses on foundations of relational and statistical AI together with advanced courses on the new StarAI approaches and applications. The talks will provide theoretical background, practical examples and real applications where StarAI can play a role. Hands-on classes will be also organized where the main StarAI techniques will be applied to 'small' examples.

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) addresses the need to reason about relational domains under uncertainty arising in a variety of application domains. PLP is part of a wider current interest in probabilistic programming. PLP 2018 aims to bring together researchers in all aspects of probabilistic logic programming, including theoretical work, system implementations and applications.

The ILP conference series, started in 1991, is the premier international forum for learning from structured or semi-structured relational data. Originally focusing on the induction of logic programs, over the years it has significantly expanded and it welcomes contributions to all aspects of learning in logic, multi-relational data mining, statistical relational learning, graph and tree mining, learning in other (non-propositional) logic-based knowledge representation frameworks, exploring intersections to statistical learning and other probabilistic approaches.

RAID 2018 offers a very good opportunity to get up to date with the latest trends in logical and relational AI. We really hope to meet you in Ferrara!